Everything great in the world is done by neurotics; they alone founded our religions and created our masterpieces. ~Marcel Proust

Sunday, April 12, 2015

This Ain't Andy's Mayberry, or....Is This Really the Best We Can Do?

The police have never been popular and from the looks of things, it is certainly not getting any better.

As a young man, I had a couple of run ins with the police. Those incidents went about the way I expected. What I never expected nor experienced was a sense of hatred for the police who were simply doing their jobs. I never received a ticket that I didn't deserve. I was once detained and fingerprinted but I never held the police responsible for that grand theft or the humiliation of leaving high school in handcuffs. There is a great deal of inherent power in knowing that not only are you innocent of a crime- but that you actually know who was responsible for the act. I chose not to tell the police who did it- I might have been a little more cooperative had they acted a little more decently. Oddly, I think those cops thought I was guilty up until they found out that I had an iron clad alibi. I threw freight all night long on a grocery store freight crew the night of that theft. My whereabouts were completely accounted for- something they didn't know when they dragged me out of school. So who fingered me for this crime? A city employee that I had been at odds with for a long time. I think that was my first taste of how self centered, devious, and conniving people can be. Suing the police never even entered my mind. As a teenager, I associated with more than my share of sick and twisted folks. I was certainly no saint but I didn't run around fingering people for crimes, making shit up, nor did I blame the cops for my poor decisions. As stupid as I was- I still had a sense of responsibility which I thank gawd- came about because my parents did not run around like victims blaming other people.

I shifted gears out of liberal arts and into law enforcement during my third year in college. I still had some personal issues of my own to deal with. I was far from perfect but I believed in the law enforcement mission and I graduated thinking that I'd have an opportunity to help people.

Looking back, I simply underestimated how completely incapable our culture is when it comes to taking responsibility for their actions. They just can't do it. It is an epidemic. That was the last thing I said to the local reporters when I retired in 2007. People just cannot accept the consequences for their poor decisions and they will go to great lengths to blame anyone or anything, desperately trying to rationalize their actions while criticizing the actions of others.

That includes bad cops and sometimes- bad prosecutors. If you think bad cops go unpunished- you should see the shit prosecutors get away with. You don't hear much about those crooked bastards because shit always runs downhill and prosecutors sit at the top of those hills. How else does Hillary Clinton get away with committing perjury and obstruction over Benghazi? How about shaking down foreign leaders while using her position as Secretary of State to pick up a few million here or there. The implication being that if Hillary were to win the Presidency- those donors will want something in return for all of that money deposited in the Clinton Foundation- which is just a fancy name for their own personal slush fund.

Hillary gets away with all of that because prosecutors practice something worse than cops. They practice cowardice, indifference, and criminal complicity as they fail to uphold the laws that they swore to uphold. Cops may screw up but they often pay dearly when they do and if not-it's not for a lack of scrutiny. Prosecutors don't. They are some of the most cowardly pussies on the planet and they behave like courtroom bullies. Rarely are they held accountable- one glance at Eric Holder's history tells that story.

But the helicopters don't hover over prosecutors and court rooms. Cameras, installed on every cellphone in America, are capturing cops in action. And it's not good. Last week I stared in awe as California cops literally kicked the shit out of an unarmed pursuit suspect- an incident captured from a helicopter.

What is wrong?

Potential cops are subjected to polygraphs, monstrously long psychological tests and department shrinks, drug tests, oral boards, physical tests, background examinations, and every other inquiry that anyone can think of. If background investigators could remove the brains of potential cops- they'd try it- all in some misguided effort to avoid hiring cops who get the police brass and politicians in trouble. Like that cop in South Carolina who executed a motorist. The criminal intent was clear. That officer is a murderer who might have gotten away with it if not for a piece of video captured by a witness. Absent that video- you can bet money that the uncorroborated testimony of that witness would have been ignored, discredited, and marginalized out of existence.

Which takes me back to those evil little bastards of my youth. The ones who stole a golf cart one night, destroyed it, blamed it on me, and laughed as I left the school that morning in handcuffs. Some people are just evil and malignant, criminal. Others are a product of their environment- I know this because it happened to me over the course of 25 years.

You can't subject people (cops) to a never ending diet of vitriol, assholes, and hatred and expect them to behave like Andy Griffith in Mayberry. You can't lie to people, obstruct them, call them pigs, spit at them, attack everything theydo without consequence. Serve cops, or anybody for that matter, a steady diet of vitriol and pretty soon, you have cops that are assholes. They lash out, become depressed, develop health problems, get divorced, become alcoholic, and then one day- they snap. I don't say this with any intent other than to explain what happens. I give no excuse or quarter to criminals who cross the line- badge or no badge.

You don't want the mentally ill in charge of policing the mentally ill.

I snapped one night, years ago in the late '90's. I was in a bar taking a theft report and a drunken asshole with a pool cue decided to start a hog calling session. It might have been cute a couple of times- but by about the 15th time he yelled "SOOOey" at the tops of his lungs, I snapped. I walked over to him and asked if he'd like to step outside the bar. He refused. And that's when I whispered to him, "One more SOOOey asshole and you'll leave this place on your head." I didn't want to start a bar riot and my ploy worked. I can't tell you how the hog calling champion would have fared- as I exited a hostile environment with him in tow.

The boss took me off nights. But 17 years worth of swing shifts had taken their toll on me. I never really recovered. I became Chief a year later- but you just can't just shower the stench of 17 years worth of assholes off and get happy again- try as hard as I could. It's some sort of process that I never fully grasped. I do know people in the business who retire with good attitudes and who exit the business relatively sane. Those folks still mystify me. I think had I had access to a good psychologist I might have been salvageable. As it stood, I got my divorce, quit my job, and had the courage to get sober. It took me the better part of five years to get my life back.

There will always be a few homicidal maniacs who slip through the cracks. I busted one once- a cop who had executed a drug dealer by shooting him in the back of the head. As I write this, I remember waiting on a homicide arrest warrant which had not arrived and explaining to this guy that we were arresting him for failure to display a front license plate after we detained him on a traffic stop. I remember him looking at us with this incredulous look- and asking us why we were arresting him for such a chicken shit offense. At the jail- when we handed him a copy of the First Degree Murder warrant- it suddenly became crystal clear to him. This guy, a California cop, had actually been hired by one of our local police agencies but hadn't started yet.

I think we are on the verge of some sort of police renaissance. Body cameras are coming for everyone. That's a given. I'd like to go one step further.

I'd like to see all cops given access to mental health professionals. I'd like to see police brass, councils, and citizens support the idea that just like war veterans- our police officers are combat weary. They simply cannot be subjected to years of ritualized abuse and then be expected to behave like Mother Theresa or Ghandi. If police officers had the ability to diagnose what's wrong with them- they would have done it long ago. That's not to say that they aren't responsible for their actions- they most certainly are- but that's not gonna help some guy avoid a future beating nor is it going to save millions of taxpayer dollars lost in defense or judgments on just one of these claims.

I have never met a cop anywhere who told me that he wanted the opportunity to become jaded, cynical, and depressed and then take it out on some bad guy. I don't think that's anybody's plan. But it keeps turning out that way. I don't see it getting any better either. We need to do a better job of identifying depressed, alcoholic, and angry personnel and giving them a fighting chance before they start kicking the shit out of some poor guy in the desert. We do it for military personnel, are cops really that different? No...except that unlike a two or three year military tour of duty for military personnel complete with PTSD counseling- cops do what they do for 25 or 30 years without any kind of counseling or support. Or...

We can just keep denying that there is a problem. We can continue blaming police agencies for limiting their hiring practices to mean, jaded, and cynical people prone to depression and beating up people. That's the way the public sees it- and that's the way it is starting to look. I don't see this getting any better any time soon.

6 comments:

so cops' PTSD is more deeply-based than military? So show me some sops who killed and were maimed in a war based upon a pack of lies so that the country could be flooded with heroin. Oh btw, that would have taken place 10,000 miles from home, where you couldn't return home or to the local bar each night to get drunk and screw your fellow officer's wife. And while there's no making light of the families you wasted for absolutely no damned reason over there, at least they're dead and don't have to live for decades with a BS arrest record barring them from decent housing and employment. I don't want to be an asshole, but my first arrest was on a job I got from my former best friend, who failed to tell me the trouble he'd gotten in while I was overseas during Vietnam in the U.S. Army. Several years later, he explained my arrest, by showing me a computer printout detailing his Sleeper status with the FBI. At the top of the sheet in parenthesis read "Not to be released outside the U.S. Justice Department".

I'm just saying it exists- like it or not- which is quite obvious from your comments. The only competent analogy I could make was with military personnel who just happen to be a huge part of my inner circle.

Another excellent piece. +100 on prosecutors never getting called on charging the wrong person, one with an iron-clad alibi -- it happened to me a while back, and took $3K of legal bills to fight it and clear my name.

The sheriff's office has said Robert Bates, a 73-year-old insurance executive who was volunteering on an undercover operation in Tulsa, mistakenly pulled out his handgun instead of his stun gun and shot the suspect as he struggled with deputies.